The Deception of Gender Ideology: Its Impact on Women and Girls

Patriarchy thrives when women disassociate from their womanhood.

During my grad-school years, I was fully immersed in the bubble of “progressive” ideas and wholeheartedly advocated for gender ideology. I believed, like so many others, that I was standing with a marginalized community. But every now and then, something just didn’t sit right with me. I started to notice the cracks in the narrative, but I kept quiet. It wasn’t until I left my college-town bubble that I could finally let myself see the damage being done under the guise of “gender-affirming care.” I came to see that the movement I was supporting was working against women's liberation, reinforcing the very patriarchy it claimed to dismantle.

When I started reflecting on the young women I knew who were trans-identified I began to see a pattern. These women had all experienced sex-based trauma, such as lesbophobia or biphobia, sexual assault, or witnessing domestic violence against the women in their lives…these experiences shaped how they saw their own womanhood as they grew up. They weren’t rejecting their female bodies because they genuinely wanted to "transition." No, they were attempting to escape the inevitable subjugation that comes with being a woman in a world that devalues women.

Gender ideology also preys on vulnerable groups like autistic and same-sex attracted women and girls, offering a false promise of escape from a patriarchal world that often fails to understand them. These young women are also trying to find a way out of victimhood. By embracing a “gender identity” that distances them from their female bodies, they believe they’ve found safety; but this too is a false solution to a real problem—the sex-based oppression of women and girls.

What is being sold to these women as “gender-affirming care”—validation, hormones, surgeries—isn’t getting to the heart of their suffering. These women didn’t need to be affirmed in an identity that distanced them further from their lived reality as women. What they needed was non-affirmative therapy, real support, and justice for the harms done to them because of their female sex. Instead, they are handed methods of self-mutilation that only provided a temporary escape.

I came to realize that the movement I stood behind was nothing more than a dangerous distraction. It wasn’t offering real solutions to the exploitation women face. It was encouraging women to disassociate from their womanhood, effectively silencing their voices and erasing their experiences as women. Patriarchy was thriving under the cover of “progress,” prioritizing the delusions of men over women’s safety, health, and dignity.

I saw young women’s physical and mental health sacrificed to validate this movement that mainly benefited transvestic men, whose bodies stayed relatively untouched by the consequences. Meanwhile, these women deteriorated with weakened bones, hair loss, and genital pain.

My journey to radical feminism came out of these tough realizations. I could no longer support a movement that prioritized men’s whims while ignoring the very real repression of women and girls. True liberation doesn’t lie in denying our biological reality—it lies in directly confronting the systems that exploit and control us.

Now, as a radical feminist, I’m committed to fighting for the rights of women and girls. The path forward is clear: solidarity. We don’t need to run from womanhood to escape oppression; we need to fight back together. Our freedom won’t come from erasing who we are, but from reclaiming our identity and embracing it with pride. Only then can we truly build a future where all women are free.